I spend my working life between two rooms — the one where the business decisions get made, and the one where the software actually gets built. Most of what I do is making sure those two rooms are talking about the same thing.
For more than twenty years I’ve been turning complicated business, legal and operational problems into technology that holds up. I’ve advised enterprise clients and led mixed technical teams across the UK, Europe and the Middle East, and I’m as comfortable in front of a board as I am sitting with engineers working through a design.
A lot of that work has been in data-heavy, tightly regulated places — eDiscovery, digital forensics, information governance, GDPR — for clients in banking, insurance, oil and gas, pharma, mining and manufacturing. Running teams in London, Frankfurt and Hong Kong taught me that the technology is rarely the hard part. The hard part is balancing cost, confidentiality and regulation until you land on something that actually works.
These days I’m Co-Founder and Product Architect at Evidenx, an AI-native SaaS platform, where I look after product strategy, technical architecture and AI-assisted development in Rust, Next.js and PostgreSQL. Through my consultancy, Rapu, I bring the same mix — board-level judgement and hands-on modern delivery — to founders and scale-ups as a fractional CTO and technology advisor.
I’d rather have the uncomfortable conversation in month one than the expensive one in month nine.
What I advise on
Selected engagement
Changing course on a cross-border eDiscovery programme
I was leading technical delivery on a large eDiscovery project running across the US and Germany, and I ended up challenging a review strategy the legal team had already committed to the court. The plan assumed English-speaking reviewers could work through a largely German-language collection using machine translation — but the technology simply couldn’t sustain the throughput needed for more than 400 reviewers at once. So I modelled the alternatives, put together a revised strategy with new timelines and costs, and built the technical case the legal team needed to explain the change to the court. Changing direction early cost a fraction of what pursuing that plan would have.
Where I’ve worked
Credentials
Diploma, Governance Risk & Compliance — ICA
Diploma of Policing — Royal New Zealand Police College
Certified Forensic Computer Examiner (CFCE)
Certified Electronic Evidence Collection Specialist
Work with me
Fractional CTO work, technology and data advisory, or just a straight answer on something you’re weighing up.